Artificial

 

Another long day, not a sign of real

Talking to you, gadget of time killer fills,

Your automatic voice of sexless syllables

Translated from Human into Non-Feel.

I push your buttons but nothing happens,

Work the circuitry, connect devices.

Your configured widgets once were priceless.

Now your loop ever runs out of options.

You’ve applications under that bonnet

Programmed to please in digits unfurled.

My socializing you fully document

As if what I meant is what you meant

But you cannot write a book ‘The Ideal World’,

You cannot contrive a meaningful sonnet.

 

Spode

 

Rain on roads and remains without reserve

Clears slightly and light lines feint blue clouds,

Creatures testing shallows, and flowers in crowds

As if outside could always be this preserve.

The teapot sails from cup to steaming cup

That patterns this scene of pastoral bliss

Where a figure reads in a grotto of mist

Rhyming couplets; where time is never up.

News is hard the other side of the pane

As autumn unwinds and insects vanish.

High tides and heat waves make no distinctions.

The knowing protest against extinction

Then go home to something Spanish.

Another warm day, not a sign of rain.

Eye

 

When in Rome, go to riotous Raphael

Crowded with weekday shoppers in bold folds,

Their once-in-a-lifetime vistas untold

Where empires’ blockbusters never fail.

Vespas buzz out of sight of oculus;

Palaces peer down, churches seek repair.

Human-high inscriptions defy despair,

Cool sublime atop the ridiculous.

Eye summonses, with palindrome nerve

Through curves and white staircases of the brain

Perfectly lucid in every detail,

Last judgments upon paradigm female

And paragon male in Carrara grain,

Ruins, roads and remains without reserve.

 

 

Note: Not only is 'eye' a palindrome, it is one of those words in English that is self-descriptive, with its y of a nose and mouth. The sonnet plays with how our sight is an extraordinary palindrome in which everything out there is repeated in reverse inside us. If you had to choose a place to describe how inside us is everything we need to perceive outside, replicated in all its complexity, Rome would have to be a frontrunner.

Perverb

A slight subversion is a shared smile:

He who laughs last didn’t get the joke.

Lead with the chin and lose your grin.

One hand clapping gets the ears flapping.

What doesn’t kill you leaves your nose out of joint.

Keep your eye on the ball and shoulder to the wheel.

A phone in the hand is a crash in the pole.

It takes the biscuit how the cookie crumbles.

Money makes the world go round money.

Phoney pols are a crash in the polls.

Her Greek gifts were his Achilles heel.

Trackwork means footwork: less trains less often.

All roads lead to home sweet home.

When in Rome, go to Rio.

Supermarket

Almost ready to comprehend the cost,

Zombies with earphones moonwalk the aisles

Eye contact zero, skin contact frost,

Trollies with everything mounting in piles

Render unto us the plenty of Caesar.

Seize Easter bargains with mild aggression.

Selfish shelfies, absorbed at deep freezer,

Self-consumed by the delicatessen.

Near collisions at dangerous corners,

All most greedy apprehending what’s found:

Guzzlers, gulpers, tasters, chewers, yawners.

Seattle thrash for musical background.

With the check-out at last I break denial,

The wild subversion of a shared smile.

Cruciform

 

It’s the weekend wrap-up takes a minute,

A workman’s error, a votive candle.

Circulate ready theory and spin it.

There’s no-one like Someone to blame for scandal.

Rumours take over when all’s left is ash.

Accident committees enforce their will.

Electrical fault, a digital flash:

Emptiness forwards the bill.

Cathedral furnace leaves walls a stone cross

Between the streams on an island of time,

Their only boast who count the loss

Amid the dreams of stars and grime.

They’ve been here before, abandoned and lost,

Unready to comprehend real cost.

Clock

 

Glistening cold grey sea, rainbow tree dawn.

Squalls are cockatoos, laugh a kookaburra.

Houses discover shadows, their former forms.

Light colours everything good and thorough.

Glass face resumes its imperious look.

Six o’clock points both to heaven and hell.

Seven forgets all the work that it took.

Square face for ten dollars with alarm bell

Stays put, emotionless, amidst the objects:

Spectacles to re-wipe where night lines left off,

Money jar’s pillar of silver gold subjects,

Crystal bowl filled with key-rings and stuff. 

Writers awake with metaphors to settle.

Others get up and put on the kettle.

Seascape

I know this, I know that, and here it is.

Drizzle hazes greens, browns neutral patches,

By levels into grey seas permanent business

Inlet beaches where bit sunlight catches

Prior to blackening clouds. Their white rainfall

Hides the waves the trees the river the road

Water drifting both ways in towers and walls

Toward whitened sea and high hills’ load.

Tinsy leaf glints at window, the rain again,

Window pale-grey pale-blue rivery lines.

Decking’s rings rings rings, as spouts explain

Everywhere’s downward, roads creekbeds with signs.

Else, clears a quarter-hour to white upon blue

Glistening greens in sea and trees rainbow.

Montaigne

His book of desires is a thousand tracts

His heart pursues where they will go, now.

Spontaneous is thought so just relax;

Originality comes, he knows not how.

He fends between ignorance and madness,

Neither extreme a true account of self.

He wends between some good and too-badness

On horseback, in court, bed, by book shelf.

With him, digression is progression.

He never seeks to hide distracting thoughts,

Interrogates his final impression:

It takes a special kind of mind and all sorts.

His book is like others in only this:

I know this, I know that, and here it is.

Photograph is of morning reading at Wye River. That’s me, soaking up Sarah Bakewell’s wonderful book on Michel de Montaigne entitled ‘How to Live’. Our cat April meanwhile gives a practical demonstration of how to live. Photograph by Carol O’Connor.

Facebook

Us millions, too busy much to give them a glance:

Give a word that begins and ends with T.

Bet you cannot name ten cities in France.

Politicians, their to be or not to be.

Someone’s dog’s breakfast, someone’s cat’s cradle.

Celebrate being a computer’s friend five years.

It comes out of space lit without a cable.

The palm goes vivid wherever it appears.

As we turn back to all the things not done,

The place where practical questions arise,

The home where we are that certain someone

Muddling in the middle of our tries.

Our face in the mirror lives with the known facts.

Our book of desires is a thousand tracts.

 

 

 

 

 

Dead

Open the dead to help us translate all we know:

Their words massed against likelihood of loss

Faltering with fault or going with the flow,

Piling up emblems or giving not a toss

As they talk all the rage of their long-lost town

Down in time, gripping the tale of their own kind.

How foolish their plans so grand and renowned

Passed on to us since of another mind.

Listen to the dead in every word we speak

Their lives more precious to some, and their parish -

Their collects select and their speeches peak,

Syllables partying lifetimes, nice and lavish.

Only for us is day this wideawake expanse

Us billions, too busy much to give them a glance.

Wine

Then imprint their red stain with fallen drops

In rings upon open page and tablecloth,

Only written record of our discussions non-stop

Over dinner and after last night, on and off.

Sun, that modulates water through grape and brain,

Rises raging above the ocean again, a gain

That we may count on, resuming daily change:

Today’s jokes, today’s lessons, today’s again pain.

Clink of our thoughts, like empties by the door,

Fragile and unspoken, change into ambient

Or a music of footfalls, symphony of chores,

Human arias of everyday, forceful through lenient.

Tonight we will set out our meal and woke words,

Open a red to help translate what we heard.

 

Renga

These dozen masters of the haiku punch-line

Their Dogen days gone like their long spent youth

Word Mount Fuji or itemise lunchtime,

As if signs on paper fit in for the truth.

They fold each hanging line, each splash of time

Over, for the next one to draw conclusions.

Their practice is so careworn it’s ever primed,

At home with contemplation and confusions.

Autumn offers favours, both harvest and death.

It’s like knee bones loosening, how breathing stalls,

Except knee bones’ hurt it is, and shortness of breath:

Autumn for Dogens moons, gathers, wobbles, falls.

They glob and smooth black ink toward relief

Then imprint their red name like a fallen leaf.